3. Turn Down the Dial
I wish the last sentence of chapter 2 was true, don’t you?
Wouldn’t it be amazing if I had one thing you could do that would stop all your overthinking forever?
All your friends would say, “What’s different about you? You seem more calm, confident, and successful. Have you been drinking a lot of water?”
“Thank you for noticing, but no, it’s not water. It’s Jon Acuff. He told me the cure to ending overthinking. I’d share it, but you should buy the book yourself so his kids can go to college.”
Wow, I wasn’t expecting that. My oldest daughter’s high school English teacher told her to just find a free PDF of Lord of the Flies online instead of buying the book or to get a bootleg copy of the audiobook on YouTube. That you’re telling people to pay for art is truly encouraging.
Art is exactly what it would be, this perfect cure. It would be a miracle. My singular masterpiece. It wouldn’t stay singular for long, of course, because if it was successful, I would immediately release a follow-up book to capitalize on my newfound fame. That one would be called The Second Cure, or Cure-ier, and I’d be on the cover of that one with a wry grin that seemed to say, “I can’t believe I found another cure for overthinking either!”
I spent decades looking for that one thing that would end my overthinking forever. I’m a sucker for motivational gurus, and the bigger the overpromise, the bigger my belief that this one would be the one that worked. I was convinced I was only one idea, one technique, one hack away from changing everything all at once.
I was wrong.
No matter what I tried, no matter how long I held my breath, no matter what I studied, I couldn’t completely turn off my broken soundtracks. You know you’re a bit stuck when you try to play your meditation app at 2× speed. It worked for audiobooks. Maybe if I got twice as much mindfulness in half as much time, everything would be fixed. Despite my best efforts, my broken soundtracks still kept getting loud sometimes. I kept retiring them, assuming they’d be gone forever. But then they’d pop up in unexpected moments, like Brett Favre refusing to leave the NFL for good. I felt like a failure until I had breakfast with David Thomas.
It’s a Dial
David Thomas wears cool glasses. That’s not the most important thing about him, but it is distinct. He’s one of those guys who can wear glasses with clear frames without looking like he’s a dad still trying to pull off Air Jordans. “What, these? Didn’t mean to flex.” In addition to his excellent ocular fashion sense, he’s also the director of family counseling at Daystar, a center for kids in Nashville. He’s the author of six books and an accomplished public speaker, but it was an offhand comment he made over coffee that changed what I believed about retiring broken soundtracks.
In the middle of a long list of questions I was asking him, David said, “The problem with the internal voices we hear is that we want a switch.” I hadn’t heard thoughts described that way, so I asked him to explain what he meant.
“We think that there’s a switch out there and if we can just find it, we can turn off the background noise completely. We only have to do it one time and we’ll never hear it again. People want there to be a switch.”
“Those people are crazy,” I replied, having spent the last few years of my life looking for that exact thing.
“It’s not a switch though,” he continued, “it’s a dial. The goal isn’t to turn it off forever, the goal is to turn down the volume. It’s going to get louder sometimes. That’s how dials work. But when life turns up the negative thoughts, we get to turn them down. That takes a lot of the pressure off because when you hear one again, it’s not a sign that you’ve failed to shut it off and need to go find a different switch. It’s just time for an action that will turn it back down.”
I wanted to jump on top of the table in the diner and shout, “It’s a dial! It’s a dial!” and then throw a sixpence to a street urchin like I was Ebenezer Scrooge so he could buy his family a fat Christmas goose.
When you live with a switch mentality, you set yourself up for automatic failure because it triggers the perfectionism soundtrack. It goes something like this: You hear a soundtrack that says, “If you could find the switch, you could turn it off and never be bothered by broken soundtracks again. You’re just one book, one exercise, one diet away from never hearing negative thoughts.” The switch can be any positive thing that you believe will deliver instant, forever silence from a broken soundtrack.
That’s when the perfectionism soundtrack gets louder. “Perfection is possible! The switch is the answer!” That’s an amazing promise. Who doesn’t want to believe that? So you try the new thing and it works for a while. The breathing technique relaxes you. The book offers fantastic insights. The counseling session encourages you. But then a week later, a month later, a day later, depending on how strong a particular broken soundtrack is, you hear it again.
Oh no! It wasn’t perfect. It’s still playing. The switch failed. Perfectionism will never tell you that it’s the switch’s fault. It’s always your fault. It does this because then you’ll start looking for a new switch instead of questioning the whole process. Time to find a second switch. You read a different book, try a different diet, change jobs, change cities, change spouses. That’s what it’s like to live with a switch mentality.
A dial is just the opposite. A dial approach says, “The goal isn’t to stop listening forever to all my broken soundtracks. The goal is to turn them down when they get loud. The goal is to head them off at the pass when a traffic jam, unexpected corporate merger, call from an estranged sibling, or any of the billion surprises life throws at you cranks the volume to 10.”
Retiring broken soundtracks is a patient practice, not a singular event. Some days you won’t hear any broken soundtracks at all. Other days you’ll look up and realize one snuck back into your life when you weren’t paying attention. When that happens, you have to turn the dial down.
What It Takes to Develop a Few Turn-Down Techniques
You have two options when it comes to life: manicure your world so perfectly that nothing ever threatens to turn the volume up on a broken soundtrack, or learn a few healthy ways to turn the dial down when it gets loud.
In the first approach, you have to avoid every idiot online, rain, taxes, long wait times at restaurants, people who are slow getting off airplanes, unexpected global pandemics, and Carol from accounting. This is very time-consuming and, I’m afraid to say, impossible.
In the second approach, you learn a few techniques that you keep in your back pocket and use to turn down the volume before it gets too loud. This approach is a lot more fun and actually possible. That’s the one David Thomas challenged me on there in that diner.
“What are the techniques?” I asked him, taking notes as fast as I could and hoping he would give me four or five very specific things to do. (I was still looking for switches at this point.)
David explained, “They’re different for every person based on how they’re wired, but essentially they’re a handful of actions you take in moments when the music gets too loud. For instance, for some people, they’ll list petting a dog as one because it’s been proven to release serotonin. I always tell people to make a few of them physical. We’re trying to move the blood back from the dinosaur part of your brain to the thinking part, and movement helps. They shouldn’t involve screens at first; they should be easy, accessible, and extend beyond one context.”
The reason they should be easy is that broken soundtracks love complicating things because then there’s lots of fodder for overthinking. Let’s pretend that one of my broken soundtracks is that I’ll never be able to write another book. Let’s imagine for a second that every time I sit down to write, that soundtrack tries to fire up and tell me I’m out of words, every good book has already been written, and everyone already knows the ideas I think are so new. Hypothetically.
Maybe one of my techniques is that when I hear that soundtrack, I turn it down by writing in my favorite seat in my favorite coffee shop at my favorite time of day. That sounds great on the surface, but what happens when I show up one day and someone is in my seat? I know exactly what happens because here’s the conversation I’ve had a dozen times:
I wish that conversation was even a little bit exaggerated, but I promise you it’s not. “Writing in my favorite seat in my favorite coffee shop at my favorite time of day” might seem like a good turn-down technique I can use when I’m stuck with my writing, but it’s not. In fact, it’s just the opposite. It’s a broken soundtrack in disguise. It’s too rigid. There are too many rules. It leads to more inaction instead of action, which is always the sign of a broken soundtrack.
I need to be able to use my turn-down techniques easily and in a variety of situations. Taking your dog on a walk is a great way to distract yourself from overthinking, but not if you’re at work. That’s why you need techniques for more than just one context.
Armed with a little information and excited to explore the dial concept, I decided to see if other people were already using their own turn-down techniques. I immediately ran into a tangle of disclaimers.
A Disclaimer about Disclaimers
During the research process for this book, I asked thousands of people what techniques they use to deal with overthinking. Online, in surveys, on phone calls, at dinner parties, in Ubers, I peppered people with questions.
I was surprised by two things:
- More people use turn-down techniques than I previously suspected.
- Nobody talks about them.
In conversations, people would lower their voices and say, “Well, I know this is silly, but . . .” and then they’d tell me about something they’d been doing every morning for the last year. For example, Adam Dupuis, a loan administration manager from Greensboro, North Carolina, told me he says “thank you” the minute his feet hit the ground and then at night before he falls asleep. When he described the benefits, he said, “This sounds totally hokey, but it’s been a great way to start and end my day.”
“Cheesy,” “weird,” and “dumb” were also words I heard a lot. Even if the technique had changed someone’s life, there was a real temptation to begin the conversation with a disclaimer. People were afraid of being judged a certain way, so they prejudged themselves before you had a chance to.
That’s unfortunate because it means the best music doesn’t really have a chance to go viral. We’ll share our broken soundtracks, lament online about all the things that aren’t working for us in life, safe in the knowledge that no one will ever really judge us for those. But when it comes to the good stuff, the music that’s making each day easier and brighter, we hold that close to the vest.
As you do the activities inside this book, you’ll be tempted to use your own disclaimers with yourself. How do I know? Well, have you ever had an idea and then determined it wouldn’t work, even before you wrote it down? As in, the idea didn’t even make it to a piece of paper or a note in your phone before you self-edited it? You should be nodding your head right now, because everyone has done that.
That’s a broken soundtrack because every idea is worthy of at least being captured. There are tens of millions of ideas that die early deaths every day because people tell themselves, “That’s weird, that’s silly, that’s cheesy, that will never work.” It’s staggering to think of the works of art, business innovations, and cures for disease that we’ve lost because someone prejudged an idea before it had a chance to really grow.
Don’t do that today. Explore what works for you without making disclaimers. Don’t judge a turn-down technique before you test it in your own life.
Turn Down for What? My Five Favorite Techniques
I tried dozens of different turn-down techniques after David Thomas explained the dial idea to me. I read stacks of books. I took online courses. I started and stopped new sports. Over the years, these are the five techniques that have helped me the most when my broken soundtracks have tried to get loud again.
1. Running
I need endorphins like fish need water. When I got serious about working on my overthinking, I got more serious about running. A few miles alone does wonders for my head and my heart. I don’t get to do it every day, but if I go three or four days without getting at least a little bit of exercise, my broken soundtracks get a lot louder.
If you hate running, that’s awesome. I hate cycling, but some people love it. I don’t like the clothes you have to wear, and I’m not a fan of any sport that occasionally involves getting hit by a car. My friend Randy got hit three different times before his parents had an intervention and bought him a mountain bike. I’ve also never had to change a flat tire on my running shoes. I wish I had discovered my distaste for cycling before I purchased a $2,000 carbon fiber road bike built for climbing the French Alps, but I have a real penchant for making expensive mistakes that hang on my garage wall and shame me for six months. I waited another six months to sell the bike back to the store I bought it from, because a broken soundtrack told me all the employees would think I was a failure.
Don’t ever use any form of exercise you hate as a turn-down technique, but find your own way to get some endorphins into your system.
2. LEGO Sets
I stumbled on this one completely by accident. One Christmas, I gave my kids the LEGO Harry Potter Hogwarts Castle. It’s a 6,020-piece ode to nerd-dom, complete with Hagrid’s hut, Harry’s dragon (from the fourth book, which is clearly the best), and even Dolores Umbridge’s pink office. We didn’t speed through it, but instead built it a bag or two a day, taking our time and watching it come together. There was something peaceful about seeing real progress. Most of my work is mental and I never see the results. There also aren’t any instructions for my career. What are the steps for becoming a full-time writer and speaker? I find following the LEGO instructions really satisfying.
3. Lists
During busy seasons, I often hear the soundtrack “You’ve got too much to do and not nearly enough time to do it all.” I feel overwhelmed because I don’t know which seemingly important task to focus on first. I turn the dial down on that soundtrack with a list. A list is the fastest way to bring clarity to chaos. Sometimes I create a list for that specific moment. Listing out what I need to get done on a project puts everything into perspective. Sometimes the list is designed to bring peace to a repetitive activity like packing for a trip. I’ve used the same packing list for the last five years. Sometimes the list centers on what I need to accomplish on a certain day.
A list is the fastest way to bring clarity to chaos.
During a busy travel season, I found myself writing down five to ten things every morning that I needed to accomplish that day on the notepads hotels keep on nightstands. Because they were small, I couldn’t do what I usually do, which is completely overthink my to-do list, adding a hundred tasks until I’d need a 96-hour Tuesday to accomplish it all. The boundary of the paper worked so well that I decided to start doing that at home too. I remembered that author James Altucher uses old-school waitress pads to capture new ideas, so I ordered a stack. Will it work? I don’t know yet, but testing techniques gives you the creative freedom to try out as many options as you want.
I don’t have fifty lists, but at any given time I have three or four that I’m actively using to turn the volume down. Putting one together is peaceful for me. Crossing the items off is peaceful for me. Tweaking the list to make it even more useful next time is peaceful for me. If your broken soundtracks ever feel chaotic, try making a list of what you need to do. Overthinking will hate that in the best possible way.
4. Minor tasks, massive payoff
When I want to turn the volume down, I put my laundry away. I go to the mailbox. I rake the yard. I fill up my oldest daughter’s car with gas. I clean my desk. I clear the stairs of the items that have been placed there by my wife in the hope that someone, anyone, will finally admit they are there and put them away. A great way to get out of your head and into your world is to do a task you can actually finish.
That’s why you’ll see me at the grocery store some afternoons buying a single item. We weren’t desperately out of Salt & Vinegar Pringles, though they are clearly the best variety, but I needed an achievable task to help me get unstuck from a bit of overthinking. Those might all seem like menial tasks, but the dividend they pay when it comes to turning down the volume is massive.
5. Friends
When I find myself in the middle of a broken soundtrack, one of the fastest ways to turn it down is to talk to a friend over coffee. That might seem intimidating at first, but don’t believe the lie that tells you you’re the only one who has broken soundtracks. As I mentioned, when I surveyed more than ten thousand people, 99.5 percent of them said they struggle with overthinking. We all overthink.
When you tell a friend a broken soundtrack, two things happen:
- They say it’s not true.
- They share one of their own.
Why will they tell you it’s not true? Because the easiest lies to see through are someone else’s. The easiest music to hear accurately is someone else’s. When friends tell me a soundtrack that’s being a jerk to them, I tell them the truth. “You’re not the worst mom in the world. No, that was probably Hitler’s mom.” See how easy that was for me? And then I’d tell you one of my soundtracks, because that’s always what happens when good friends get together.
Is That Really All You’ve Got?
What kind of self-respecting overthinker shares a list with only five items on it? I mean, really, what if you hate LEGO? You ever step on one? That’s the devil’s carpet. What if running feels like a form of punishment? I might as well have said, “Flossing your teeth is a good turn-down technique.” What if all your friends have wispy mustaches and are going to tell you that you should definitely get that face tattoo with “mizunderstood” spelled with an intentional z to highlight how different you are from conventional society? What then?
We’re overthinkers. We don’t believe in lists that are five items long. We roll fifty strong or we don’t roll at all!
I agree.
If you can’t find a turn-down technique on that list that works for you, then here’s #51: “Stop lying.” I know you didn’t already try the Steven Seagal Russia idea, which NOBODY saw coming. Putin named him as a special envoy to America? What does that even mean?
Post your favorite turn-down technique on Instagram with #soundtracks and tag me @JonAcuff so I see it.
If you do something different though, let me know. Post your favorite turn-down technique on Instagram with #soundtracks and tag me @JonAcuff so I see it. I’m always looking for fresh ways to turn down my soundtracks and would love to see what you’re up to.
Retiring broken soundtracks is a fun way to start dealing with overthinking. If you do that, you’ll be miles ahead of 99 percent of the people on the planet who never think about what they think.
But the real fun is when you learn to replace your soundtracks with music you actually want to listen to.